the wet carpet, the pickle jars, and other stories of final F-you’s to jobs you hated

by Alison Green on March 17, 2025

Last week we discussed final F-you’s to jobs or bosses you hated, and here are 18 of the best stories you shared. (Caveat: appearing on this list is not an endorsement of said behavior in every case! Stories are shared primarily for entertainment value.)

1. The revenge

A legal secretary at the Big Law firm I worked at knew she was going to be fired, so the day before she went into a bunch of partners emails and sent their wives evidence of infidelity, printed out confidential employee evaluations/communications about bonuses/pay and left them in everyone’s desk, and then cleaned out the swag closet (company-branded shirts/hats/bags etc) and dropped several thousands worth of merch with Law Firm’s name and logo off at a homeless encampment.

2. The egg salad

I (queer F) quit a job where the manager (M) kept making subtle religious misogynistic remarks. A meeting, I quietly picked up my things, went downstairs, dropped my equipment at HR and left.

I had been home for two hours before I realized I’d left my lunch in my desk. Egg salad.

I probably could have messaged someone on the team, but hey, no one had the courage to stand up for me so … yeah. I heard through the grapevine they found it two days later.

3. The stand

In a former job, I was working for a contractor to the U.S. government and was a very high-performing technical engineer in a niche field. There was another guy I worked with (I’ll call him Jake) who was also good but was very quiet, shy, and afraid of conflict. At some point, our old manager left and we got in a new manager (Tarzan), who I would describe as very macho-assertive. This new manager liked to bark orders and be short with people. This didn’t bother me because I knew I was indispensable, but it did bother Jake and he tried to avoid Tarzan as much as possible.

After a few months, I was lucky enough to score a conversion to civil servant and become a government employee directly, working in a different branch of the same agency. I had planned to notify Tarzan and his manager separately by email, but fate intervened. At our next weekly team stand-up, Tarzan was in a terrible mood and chose to leap on a small and inconsequential mistake Jake had made and gave Jake an over-the-top dressing down in front of us all, including, “This is F–king unacceptable on my team.” In the awkward silence that followed, I simply said, “I can’t work on this kind of team. I quit effective next Monday” and left the office.

I filled in Tarzan’s manager more fully about the situation and he understood and congratulated me on the move, but I heard from others who remained in the team meeting that Tarzan was truly shocked, and his apology to me later in the hallway made it clear that he spent a day or two wondering whether he was going to face repercussions for “driving me away.” Hopefully he reconsidered his approach in a more lasting way after that!

4. The wedding

This is very petty, but I can be petty if pushed.

I had a boss who always had to have someone to target. The person was always a woman. For two years, it was me. I couldn’t do anything right. If I said one thing, she said the opposite. She once blamed me for the weather. If I needed her to do something, I always advised her to do the opposite.

This same boss always prided herself on being close and in touch with her employees’ personal lives.

So when I got engaged, I told everyone but her. I invited everyone but her. (It was an office of 15 people.) I kept the whole thing secret, and everyone else was scared to tell her. My wedding occurred when she was on vacation. Everyone also knew I was moving to be with my husband after I got a job where he was. For at least three months, everyone knew all of this information except her.

When she got back from vacation, I put in exactly two weeks. I told her I’d gotten married. The look of shock on her face was all the revenge I needed. Then, at the going-away party I told her I didn’t want, I gave the staff a professionally framed picture of all of us at my wedding right in front of her.

On my last day, my boss was out. She tried to call me, but I let it go to voicemail. She told everyone else, “I will never get over this. I can’t believe she did this.”

I’m sure she did though. In the future, don’t ever tell me what you pride yourself on.

5. The grant application

The (many multi-million dollars) grant funding for my position was ending, so I started looking for a new position. It was a long, frustrating search, during which the grand funder decided to give us a one-year extension, after previously assuring us there would be no extension. Now, in addition to my job search, I had to write a narrative and budget for the extension year. I had 20+ principal investigators who were all clammoring for the last little boost to their individual budgets and no one was willing to compromise so that the overall budget could be, ya know, within budget. My boss was unwilling to assist me in finding a solution. So, I gave all the other PIs what they wanted and cut my boss’s salary out of the proposed budget before submitting the application and starting my new job.

6. The 2FA app

I left my job a few years ago. The new big boss was a jerk, told me my position was useless and unneeded.

I was their entire IT support, by the way.

I knew he was going to fire me or push me out, so I found a new job and peaced out. I wanted to be nice about it, and I offered to show him some basic IT things he’d need to know since he said he wasn’t replacing me because he could do everything I could (reader, he could not).

One of the things I tried to insist on was a 2FA that was for a major software admin account, that was tied to my phone (we had to use an app, no choice). I explained that someone else needed to download the app and set it up before I left since the day I did, I was deleting my account/app. He declined (seriously, was like, “No, it’s fine”) and, wouldn’t you know, two days later he tried to get into something and was declined because I wasn’t there with my phone. He texted and called me about it, and I just sent him a single email saying I was no longer an employee and had no access. Then I blocked his number and ingored all other attemps at communication. He didn’t need me after all, he could handle anything!

I don’t feel bad one bit.

7. The refused non-compete

Years ago my office hired one of our interns to join us full-time. He was a great guy and we were all looking forward to having him on board in part because we were significantly understaffed. He took one look at the contract and said, “Not signing anything with a non-compete.” We knew he had other offers and admin actually listened to us and took the non-compete out of his contract. Which meant they had to take it out of ours as well, but that’s not the point of the story.

My boss was a rigid, bigoted jerk. He was also my grandboss’s favorite so we never even tried to get any traction. New hire had two little kids and a wife with a completely inflexible job, so when the kids got sick, he stayed home. We had plenty of sick time but Boss thought this was inappropriate because 1) mothers should stay home with sick kids, not fathers and 2) it showed a lack of dedication to the job. Finally he called new hire into a meeting and told him he should hire a nanny.

New hire gave notice the next day and opened his own office across the hall because he had no non-compete.

8. The inventory

My boss had it in for me after HR revealed EVERYTHING I told them in an investigation into him. I was a retail manager and we were preparing for the annual store inventory, which was to start when we closed at 6 pm on a Sunday and generally took about six hours. I was in charge of preparing for it. I had detailed notes, a store map marked with what had been prepped and the schedule to finish it. One of the things HR was investigating were complaints that my boss didn’t do anything all day, and preparing for inventory was included. He took no interest in anything I was doing and I managed the process myself.

One of the cashiers had left a roll of quarters out at the end of the night on my closing shift. My boss took that opportunity to immediately fire me for “unsecured funds” the next day. I left in tears. This was technically policy, but for $10, unlikely to be enforced unless someone had a grudge.

One of my employees called me on my way home, as she noted I didn’t go in back to collect my things. In addition to the energy drink and my lunch in the fridge, I asked her to grab the inventory map and my notebook and erase a to do list on the whiteboard, which she happily did. There was no other record of what had been done and what needed to be done for the inventory, and since he had not participated in the prep work at all, my boss had NO IDEA what to do.

The inventory went horribly. What normally took six hours took 11! I felt bad for the hourly employees who were there that long, but at least they got a nice paycheck and none were scheduled to open the next day. My boss was salary. He not only had to stay there for free until 5 am, he had to open the store at 7 am. Since they were short-handed due to losing me, he had to work his full 10-hour shift.

9. The tirade

I’ve told this one here before, but it’s so good. It happened like 15 years ago and I still think about it regularly.

The best rage quit I ever witnessed: we had a weekly all-hands staff meeting with mandatory attendance. If you were on the road you were required to dial in. ‘Mike’ called in, and when it was his turn to speak he delivered a scathing tirade that was the stuff of quitting fantasies — absolutely A+ stuff. The big boss was so stunned he couldn’t respond at first… but then he pulled it together and hung up on Mike. But Mike was a step ahead — he’d dialed in on TWO lines, so he was STILL on the call, and got another couple of killer lines in before he got disconnected for good! Mike was a company hero for months after that.

10. The wet carpet

My then-boyfriend, future-husband and I worked together at a TGIFriday’s-style restaurant in the late 1990s. We were both scheduled on a Sunday morning, and with the plan to drive to work together, I’d spent the night at his place (an apartment in his parents’ basement) on Saturday night.

Around 8 am on Sunday, I stepped out of bed to start getting ready and, as I stepped down, my foot touched something wet. Something wet enough to soak my sock in about two seconds. Turns out the basement was flooded — and flooded BADLY. He called in to help with clean-up, and the manager was really crappy to him, definitely assumed he was calling off due to being hungover, wanting the day off. etc. Now, my future-husband wasn’t a manger per se, but he was a keyholding floor supervisor (basically a fill-in if a manager wasn’t available to work), a trainer, and sometimes a fill-in book keeper for the restaurant — so not someone who casually calls off work.

He pulled up a four-foot piece of dripping wet carpet, stuck it in a trash bag, and sent me to work with it. What followed became so iconic that when my cousin started working at the same restaurant more than three years later, it was still a story being told to new people. Luckily (for me, not them), the manager who was crappy on the phone was standing at the host stand as I walked in the front door. I dropped the huge, lawn-sized trash bag at their feet and said, “Mike thought you didn’t believe him when he called earlier. He wanted me to bring you this proof and to tell you he quits,” then walked away to clock in.

Calls were made to Mike, and the resignation stuck. When the manager asked me to clean up the trash bag, I refused saying it was a gift for him, not me. Still not sure how I didn’t get fired for that.

11. The hotel rooms

Back in the early 2000s, I worked at a hotel. Our hotel was negatively affected by 9-11 because of the decrease in travel. We were eventually foreclosed on by the bank and were owned and operated by the bank for three years until it was sold. The people that bought the hotel came in and let almost everybody go and staffed it with their family. They didn’t lay off the front desk manager yet because she had information they needed.

The night we all got let go, I went over to the front desk manager’s house and she proceeded to log onto all of the hotel booking sites we sold rooms through — hotels.com, Expedia, Priceline, etc., and changed the rates to $1 per night and then called all of her friends and told them to book a room. The new owners got in the office the next morning and saw all the confirmations for the $1 rooms (the hotel had 400 rooms so probably 100+ were booked this way) and freaked out and started calling her, begging for the login information so they could get in and stop the bleeding. She didn’t answer the phone.

12. The parking access

A few jobs ago, I worked with a team that provided onsite parking for corporate employees of a major online retailer with significant physical presence in my nearby metropolitan area. We were all laid off kind of abruptly, because Retailer decided they wanted to switch to a cheaper parking lottery system.

Background: the system we used to assign parking worked on sometimes months- or years-long wait lists to get parking in an employee’s chosen buildings, with less secure “temporary” spaces also available at less optimal garages. Parkers were supposed to reach out to us with issues they encountered with their access fobs. One of the people using a temp garage, “Percy,” wrote us silly poems about his access woes whenever he had to reach out, and quickly endeared himself to the entire team that way. He happened to be on a wait list for a building that was notoriously slow-moving and difficult to get parking access in, but he was always upbeat and kind in his emails, which was a nice break from the usual for us. He became legendary in our office even though we were only there about a year and a half.

On our last day, a couple coworkers and I realized that because all our emails/inboxes were getting deleted, nobody would get in trouble if we just … gave Percy parking access to his preferred garage. So together the three of us penned a little thank you note to him for always brightening our days and got his new access fob sent out before we left. I hope if he’s still there, he’s loving his parking access.

13. The pickles

When I worked at a grocery store we had a worker who was still in high school get fired for missing too many shifts. He seemed to take it well, but when he went to turn in his uniform, he passed through the condiment aisle and took every third jar of pickles and smashed them on the ground. That aisle smelled like pickles for at least a month afterwards.

14. The debrief

Mine was a more belated F-you. You know the saying, revenge is a dish best served cold. I used to work for a tiny consulting firm, and they thought they were The Shit. I had worked there for a long time, and I finally screwed up the courage to leave after years of being treated poorly.

I got a job at a huge company that was a big client of tiny firm. The CEO of Tiny Firm was buds with a VP of Big Client, so I can only assume management of Tiny Firm thought that they had things locked in for continued business at Big Client. The thing is, that VP has no actual authority over the subsidiary and department I work for, and it’s actually me and people at my level who often make decisions on which consulting firms to bring on for jobs. So when a job came up for bid, my old tiny firm submitted a proposal, along with several others. I reviewed all the bids, and theirs was by far the highest and, quite frankly, missed the mark. I sent them an email letting them know that their bid was not successful and they asked for a debrief. So I responded with a high-level list of their deficiencies. The most satisfying deficiency I got to point out was in a discipline that I am a widely-known expert in (in my industry). They were just flat-out wrong about a regulatory change I was heavily involved in. Best part was that the person who asked for the debrief is the same person who when I resigned said that they weren’t worried about my many years of industry knowledge leaving with me. I guess they needed my industry knowledge after all.

15. The thermostat

My mom worked in an office that had grown very toxic —and she was the only person who knew how to adjust the thermostat (don’t ask!). Literally on the way out the door on the day she quit, she jacked it up all the way to 90.

16. The copier

I work for a company that services copiers. The way our service contracts are structured, clients are billed based on the number of pages they print. So the more things they print/copy, the more they pay each month. We had one client call in years ago stating that their bill had to be wrong because they never make anywhere near as many pages as they were billed for. They called back a few days later and let us know that they had figured out what had happened. An angry employee who was leaving the company came into the office the day before she was quitting, after everyone else had left, and just printed off hundreds of pages just to run their bill up.

17. “I understand, I just don’t care”

I quit my last job with no notice. The PTO policies were draconian, an on-paper 10-hour shift would routinely stretch to 14 hours, and in the throes of Covid staff had to eat their lunches out in their cars – in January, in the northeast. I secured a comfortable new job on a Thursday and told the new place I could start Monday. I’d been there 2 months and wasn’t going to stay a day more.

At the end of my shift, I told the managers not to expect me on Monday. They asked me why I was doing this to them; I calmly replied, “Because I don’t like working here.” When admonished that I didn’t understand the staffing bind this put them in, I said, “No, I do, I just don’t care.” Unsure of what to say to this, they looked at me with their mouths open until I decided this wrapped things up and said “Well, enjoy your weekend!” and walked out. As I headed out, one of the friendlier staff, unaware of what just happened, called out, “See you on Monday!” to which I called back, “I wouldn’t count on that!”

18. The escape

I unfortunately wasn’t there to witness this myself, but at the fast food joint I worked at in college one of the high school aged employees leapt out of the drive thru window and shouted, “I QUIT” as he ran across the parking lot.

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{ 73 comments }

{ 73 comments… read them below or add one }

  1. cat mom x2*

    the I QUIT!! and running away one is gold. i know someone who did a similar thing – in high school, they were working a miserable job at british TJ maxx (whcih is called TK maxx). halfway through a shift they rage quit and threw their badge across the store and walked out. turns out they left something behind so had to come back later that day, their manager had no idea they’d even quit

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  2. Muggsy Bogues*

    Left what had become a pretty toxic situation with an annoyingly cliquey boss several. She loved to very openly talk about how we were the only team that got anything done in the whole company (other than one other department whose head somehow got along with her, of course). At one point, she had purchased our whole team “special” coffee mugs. She liked to talk about them making us look so cool and unified as a team when we rolled up to all-staff meetings, and warned us that we shouldn’t leave them in the kitchen in case others would use them. When I left, I gave mine to her least favorite coworker.

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    1. Muggsy Bogues*

      I’m incredibly non-confrontational and could’ve done far worse to her, but didn’t feel right screwing over my coworkers who were still going to be subjected to working with her. (I missed the initial post, so I’m sharing now anyway because I just love reading these types of posts, and it’s nice to feel like I’ve got something — if not very exciting — to contribute.)

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  3. Wonder Woman's Tiara*

    I was so sad not to get to have one of these.

    I worked in a call centre for just over a year at the height (depth?) of the last recession, and while most of my colleagues were delightful (several years after leaving, one of them invited me to her wedding), the customers were everything you’d think of from call centre customers. As an example, the friend who later invited me to her wedding spoke perfect English but had a noticeable foreign accent that seemed like blood in the water to racists (she also sounded young, because… she was). One time when some appalling woman made her cry when I was sat next to her, I took her headset, put it on and delivered the soundest bollocking of my life down the phone. (I started out with “Is your mother proud she raised you to make a teenage girl cry?” and went from there…)

    ANYWAY, fourteen months of hell and untold panic attacks later, I was out! And I swore to myself that if any customer put a toe out of line in my last week in that hellscape, I would make my Bollocking Of Racist Lady look like it had been delivered by Princess Di and Mother Theresa’s sweet guardian baby angel. I would go ham. They would get the full force of every response I had had to suppress in fourteen months of listening (mostly) passively to racist, sexist, classist, xenophobic, queerphobic, entitled bullshit. I had multiple opening gambits prepared and everything.

    Dear reader, every single caller that week, for the only week in my full tenure there, was a perfect darling. Nobody so much as sounded grumpy at forking over ridiculous prices to watch the football. The last person I spoke to was a lovely little old lady who congratulated me on getting out and wished me luck before I said goodbye.

    Sod’s Law truly is real, and for just that one time, I regretted it.

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    1. Jill Swinburne*

      I love this story. And you for standing up to horrible people.

      When I was breastfeeding I had a whole heap of fantastic, cutting responses planned for busybodies who told me not to do it in public (otherwise I knew I’d think of the perfect response hours later), and over two years…nothing. Couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed.

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      1. Noname McGee*

        There’s an old College Humour video about “When coming out goes easier than you thought” which really encapsulates this feeling for me. All those witty retorts, wasted on the imaginary strangers in my brain!

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      2. TeratomasAreWeird*

        I’m a female-presenting person who had a large ovarian tumor, and I was *so ready* for all the pregnancy questions I was sure I was going to get from prying strangers.

        “How far along are you?” => “Approximately two years.”
        “Is it a boy or a girl?” => “I’m hoping for benign!”
        “When are you due?” => “It’s being removed and biopsied in March.”

        Between COVID social distancing, bulky winter jackets and people apparently being less prying than expected, I only ever got to use the first one, and the person felt so bad about her assumption (and afraid I’d complain to her boss) that wasn’t even fun.

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      1. Wonder Woman's Tiara*

        On the upside, I now run DEI events, and given the current *gestures at everything* I likewise keep some snappy retorts in my back pocket in case of an unexpected appearance from Dickheadus Interrupticus.

        If the fact that I know in advance my answer to “How many genders are there?” is “Lots, and we add more every time you ask that” is what’s keeping the bell-ends away, then I’ll take that and welcome.

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    3. canuckian*

      When I worked at a call centre (I’m an ex-Con) between 08-10, one of my coworkers was Acadian (French) with a French first name and Irish last name. And while he grew up speaking french, his accent was not noticeable at all. Anyhow, we were in Canada but on a contract with an American cell phone company, rhymes with Clint… He got a call once and when he said his name, the customer lost it, yelling and screaming that he didn’t want to deal with someone who was French and hung up on him. Coworker’s Team Lead was in a meeting but when she got out, he told her what happened–and when she called the customer back, he ranted at HER about it. I think she just ignored him and got done what he wanted but yeah, customers.

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  4. The Bobs*

    #17, “What if–and believe me this is a hypothetical–but what if you were offered some kind of a stock option/equity sharing program. Would that do anything for you?”

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    2. Snarkus Aurelius*

      The best part about the scene is how genuinely shocked the Bobs were that people hated working there and wanted to avoid work. I’m a boss, and even I know when my staff hate their jobs.

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  5. Alex*

    I haven’t deployed this yet, as I haven’t quit. My job in general isn’t terrible, but there is one person there, whose job title is “Retention Manager”, who is horrid. She is rude to staff and customers, constantly berates everyone around her, refuses to do her job, and is just generally a really miserable person to be around.

    I fantasize about taking all of her business cards, which are heavily used and on display, and carefully writing “Anal” in front of “Retention Manager” on each one. I’m sure the rest of the staff would have no problem handing them out that way.

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    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      The beauty of this (and it is beautiful, Alex) is that unless she knows your handwriting, you could do this now, even before you’ve quit. Just take a few at a time out of the box when she’s not looking and replace them after you’ve written “anal” on them.

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      1. LaminarFlow*

        Or, for clarity of verbiage, a stamp in the same font as the rest of the business card. But, only if said stamp can be expensed to the company.

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    2. Accessory to the crime*

      You could get those blanks from Staples or somewhere that are templates to print out your own business cards. Type up new cards that are as similar to hers as possible with “Anal” in front of “Retention Manager.” If there’s a company logo on the cards, you can probably cut & paste the logo from their website and add it to the cards. It might take longer for anyone to notice

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    1. Sunny*

      I want to know the fallout from at least half of these!! Alison, it should be a requirement in the future. Dont leave us hangingg!!

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    2. cat herder*

      SAME. As an actual legal secretary myself, I can empathize with this iconic level of IDGAF-ery. Play stupid games, get stupid prizes!

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      1. MigraineMonth*

        Yeah, I was like, “Starting strong at number 1 with burn the place down, salt the earth, and then piss on it.”

        I do wonder if the secretary faced any legal consequences for doing that at a legal firm!

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        1. goddessoftransitory*

          I frankly would be afraid to provoke her. Like when people would accuse someone of witchcraft–dude, if you think she has all this dark and unholy power shouldn’t you be trying to avoid attracting her notice?

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        2. Excel-sior*

          i have this unshakeable feeling that the corporate anger would have been mostly about the swag being donated to the homeless

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  7. Mentally Spicy*

    In my country employees are usually “salaried” (in American terms) and have contracts. One month’s notice is typical when leaving a job.

    A company I worked at for seven years suddenly decided that their required notice period was now three months. They sent everyone an email with the new contract to sign but never mentioned in person that they were changing the notice period. There was no follow up, so I just “forgot” to sign it.

    I was done with that company. I joined a four person team which brought in a pretty sizable chunk of the company’s turnover. Then my colleagues either were let go or resigned and their positions were never filled. In the end it was me, on my own, attempting to do the work of four people. And like a sucker I did it. Mostly because I liked the work and my clients.

    Eventually, though, I completely burned out. I found a job at a non-profit with zero pressure and a great work/life balance. The non-profit was desperate for me to start on a certain date. So I gave my ONE month notice.

    My then boss said to me “you’ve signed a contract that says you need to give us three month’s notice”. I said “really? I don’t remember signing any such thing. The only contract you have with my signature on it says I need to give one month”.

    They hated me for that, and I burned a bridge, but it was worth it!

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    1. mreasy*

      I had a former job that sent out a similar contract asking for 60 days minimum, and I simply never signed it. When I left, I gave the standard US two weeks and my bosses, who had treated me badly for nearly 4 years, were shocked. Shocked I say!

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  8. Susie and Elaine Problem*

    LW4: “In the future, don’t ever tell me what you pride yourself on” is extremely meme-able.

    I’m imagining a photo of someone’s pet having shredded their clothes and looking extremely non-guilty, or the aftermath of a black bear breaking into a sports car.

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    1. Snarkus Aurelius*

      Heh that was mine. I now have a boss who is obsessed with not looking stupid. She literally tells me this almost every day. Anytime I tell her something, she’ll demand to know how long I’ve known this information, and even saying two seconds is too long for her.

      I don’t have another job lined up yet, but when I do, I’ll make sure to embarrass her before I go.

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      1. Put the Blame on Edamame*

        Please update up when you do! You absolutely deserve to get out of there and show her up.

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      2. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Her: How long have you known you were leaving here?
        Me: Approximately four days after I started working here. Cheerio!

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  9. Suffering Spoonie*

    “No, I know, I just don’t care” is giving big Christopher Walken from Seven Psychopaths energy and I love it

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  10. Ami*

    #12, I used to work for the same online retailer you’re describing, and judging by your description I’m pretty sure we were in the same city too :) I never needed parking, but I still heard a lot from my coworkers about those bonkers years long waiting lists! It’s neat to hear a little from the people who were managing them; given the sheer volume, I bet that was a job and a half. I kind of wonder if your “Percy” is the same quirky guy who used to write funny poems on the employee chat email list too. If so, I’ll join you in hoping someone who brightened my office days is enjoying that coveted parking space!

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    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Oh, wow, I both hope it’s the same guy AND that there are two people out there writing poetry that makes their coworkers’ days.

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      1. Sel*

        One of my colleagues writes haikus and limericks about the hours we need to fill on our chat service. It’s truly delightful!

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  11. Goldenrod*

    LW3 – So cold, and I fully approve!

    I love how you coldly plotted it for weeks, and used her self-disclosed information against her. LOL.

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  12. Cynthia Simpson*

    I used to do medical transcription, and one of the neonatologists was constantly complaining that his dictations weren’t being transcribed properly. Well, one day he came to our office when one of my colleagues was wading through one of his dictations, and she let him listen to himself. He was horrified at how badly he dictated, and he insisted on redoing the report. After that he straightened right up and became a decent dictator. I once had a doctor tell me that “anyone” could do my job. I offered to let him try it, and he refused. Coward.

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    2. Bryce*

      I remember the first time I was asked to add comments to my week-old code. it can be eye-opening to have to understand stuff you were sure was obvious and intuitive.

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      1. MigraineMonth*

        “Gods, what moron wrote this incomprehensible, bug-ridden crap?”

        *checks Git*

        “Ah. Me, three weeks ago.”

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        1. Excel-sior*

          a regular occurrence for me in all aspects of my life, sadly. “who left that there?” “who made that mess?” “which idiot thought that was a good idea”. All me. Past-me is awful. Future-me still hasn’t figured out a way to stop his reign of terror.

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          1. Bee*

            TBH this was part of why I moved out of having roommates – I was so sick of getting angry about things like “what jerks have refused to take out the trash until it’s overflowing onto the floor” that I needed the answer to be “Past Me :/”

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  14. Mark This Confidential And Leave It Laying Around*

    These are giving me life. Special props to writing one’s useless boss out of the grant money.

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  17. Blue Spoon*

    I can’t believe I forgot to submit this one in the earlier post, but I’ll share it now:

    My first job was at a historic site that was a popular field trip destination. A lot of schools would bring their entire 4th grade classes there in a day, which meant a lot of kids coming through during field trip season, so we had a cap on how many groups we could have in a day and reservations were staggered by an hour. Reservations filled up quickly, and any cancellations tended to get refilled by other groups.

    One day we had two groups of about 100 kids show up at the same time. We thought one of them was an unscheduled group (we did occasionally have schools that couldn’t get the reservation they wanted just show up anyway), but upon further investigation, one of them was a group that had booked a visit months ago but cancelled, while the other was the group we had booked after the cancellation. It turned out that the teacher who had been our point of contact for the first group had been fired and called us to cancel the field trip in retaliation. I’m sure there’s more of a story there, but alas I never got to hear it.

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    2. Antilles*

      Wow, that’s basically like a 6-month delayed payback. I kind of wonder if the teacher even remembered it by the time it happened, given how delayed it was.
      How did you handle it? Or even more generally, how did you handle the school groups that just boldly showed up anyways? The latter were obviously playing on the “you’re not going to disappoint 100 kids by sending them back on the bus, are you?”, but you also can’t really just roll over and let it happen because that would guarantee they’d pull that trick next year too.

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      1. Blue Spoon*

        We did not and would not send a group of kids packing, but there were downsides to showing up unscheduled. If you scheduled a group in advance, you got a guided tour of the area, an equipment demonstration, and a discount on the one paid activity. Unscheduled groups only got guided tours and the equipment demo if there was staff available (sometimes there was, but if there was a scheduled group there they had priority; there were self-guided tour sheets available for free), and they had to pay the public rate for the paid activity (it was only $1 difference, but that added up with bigger groups).

        With this particular group, since it wasn’t their fault, my manager chose to make an exception and give them the group rate, and we did the best we could to give them guided tours anyway (we had done groups closer to 200 before; it was exhausting for staff, but doable).

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    3. Sunny*

      Yikes. Gotta say, I’m not on board with this one. Pulling in a bunch of kids, plus an external organization is a little too wide a net. Especially those poor kids, thinking they were going on a field trip? Not cool.

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      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        I was thinking the same thing! Why should kids and the site pay the price. (I mean, maybe the kids were really awful, but still!)

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      2. Blue Spoon*

        Yeah, I don’t know what was happening behind the scenes, but I do remember thinking that that teacher must’ve been a piece of work to cancel a field trip as revenge. My manager must have agreed, because we treated them like a scheduled group to the best of our ability.

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  18. Librarian*

    lesson shared from many of my workplaces, never piss off those who have your passwords or your keys. IT, custodial, maintenance,

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    1. bleh*

      I will never understand people who are rude to admins, knowing that they have keys to every office. I treat people with keys, digital and physical with the deference they deserve.

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    2. MigraineMonth*

      This collection is, unfortunately, a pretty good list of the reasons some places perp-walk you out the door as soon as you put in your two-weeks notice or are laid off.

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  20. Close to Retirement*

    I work at an educational institution. Shortly after I started, I learned that the head of facilities was being let go at the end of the year and replaced by an outsider. I never got the full story on what happened, but it was clear that the “Fired Guy” was well liked by the rest of the staff. For reasons unknown, after it was announced that he was leaving and the new guy started, Fired Guy stayed on and worked till the last day he was employed, which was about a week prior to the school’s graduation ceremony. 2 days after he left, the landscapers showed up with “fresh” bark mulch which they spread in the planting beds and around the trees. The next day, the odor of manure was spreading all across the campus. We quickly realized that the smell was coming from the new mulch. The idea that Fired Guy might have requested that particular mulch gave us all quite a chuckle. I hope he did! (The smell dissipated in a few days and was gone before graduation.)

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  21. LifebeforeCorona*

    I love No.2 because I hate egg salad with a passion. I had to make buckets of it for work because it was one of our more popular sandwiches. It stinks when it’s fresh so days old egg salad must reek.

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  22. George*

    I was laid off after 10 years at my company – and mysteriously right after my 50th birthday. I had no chance to log back into my computer and, although they did not “perp walk” me out of the building, I had to pack up my stuff with an HR rep watching me. It was humiliating.

    There were about 150 of us laid off st the same time and it was painful. The reason for my layoff was that they “no longer needed” my position. (I managed an internal system that was mission critical – so this was a bit odd.)

    What they did not know was that I had written down the phone numbers and access codes to the weekly internal team meeting. I bought a burner phone and called into the next team meeting after my departure. The entire call was one long list of “does anyone know how George performed this function?” Which was answered by silence every time. (This, in spite of the fact that I had clear documentation that literally lived on the system itself. And I had explained to the rest of my team where to find said documentation multiple times.)

    I was still legally their employee for the next two weeks, so I didn’t feel a bit bad about this eavesdropping. I was very glad for the mute button on the burner phone because it was all I could do to not laugh my head off.

    The cherry on top was that the system reports crashed right after my departure – and they were offline for more than 2 weeks. This was a Big Deal. I later learned that someone very high up called my team yelling that “this kind of $@&%# didn’t happen when George was here!!!”

    My former team calked me many times over the next few weeks for free help. But I thought you didn’t need me? (Insert evil laugh)

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  23. PDB*

    I once quit a job where my boss was taking credit for my work in a business where credits were important on Friday and came back as a client on Monday.

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